Winches are typically designed for heavy duty applications and are constructed of expensively machined parts to withstand the forces they are expected to encounter. Whereas there are many potential uses for winches by consumers (for personal use as differentiated from commercial use), winches heretofore available have been either of the expensive variety (with expensively produced machined parts) and thus prohibitively costly for most consumer uses, or they were so limited in their capability as to be inadequate for many consumer winching needs.